Wednesday, October 31, 2007

I'm not a fan of illicit drugs, but I'm an enemy of all policies and bureaucrats that would take away the civil liberties and freedoms and traditions our country was founded on. I can't stand the fact that the "War on Drugs" has been a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars of valuable taxpayer money and the only results we have to show for it are hundreds of thousands of citizens jailed or branded as criminals, a militarized approach to law enforcement (and the attendant growth of government that has gone along with it) and the trampling of civil rights that is the inevitable consequence of government trying to legislate morality.

Coincidently, Reason magazine has a story today on how literally our government war on drugs killed one of its citizens:

Last March, when the Drug Enforcement Administration seized less than half an ounce of cannabis that Robin Prosser, a Missoula lupus patient and medical marijuana activist, had been sent by her caregiver, the special agent in charge of the DEA's Rocky Mountain Field Division said it was "protecting people from their own state laws." Last week, unable to find a reliable supply of the only drug that relieved her pain without causing unacceptable side effects, Prosser killedherself. Although the use of medical marijuana is legal in Montana, friends say suppliers were spooked by the DEA. Writing in the Helena Independent Record,activist Tom Daubert calls Prosser's death "a direct result of DEA actions."

About a month ago I debated drug policy on the Dallas PBS station with a former head of the local DEA office, who insisted that marijuana was not a big priority for the agency. When I pointed out that his former employer was continuing to raid medical marijuana growers and dispensaries in California and other states, he said it couldn't very well sit back and allow that sort of thing. To which my response was: Why not? It is hard to understand, even from the DEA's point of view, how half an ounce of pot can be such a threat that it's worth risking an outcome like this one.

Of course, there may be negative consequences to ending the "War on Drugs" but is it going to be anything like this: